Speaker biographies

Victor Fleischer recently joined the faculty of the University of Illinois College of Law. His primary areas of research are federal income tax, venture capital and private equity, and the structuring of corporate transactions. He recently presented a draft of Two and Twenty: Taxing Partnership Profits in Private Equity Funds to a Senate Finance Committee roundtable. The article was highlighted in a New York Times editorial and will be published in the NYU Law Review in 2008. Before joining the Illinois faculty, Professor Fleischer was an associate professor of law (tenure-track) at the University of Colorado and acting professor of law (tenure-track) at UCLA. He has also taught at Georgetown as a visiting professor of law and served as the research fellow in Transactional Studies at Columbia Law School. Before entering academia, Professor Fleischer was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. He clerked for the Hon. M. Blane Michael, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the Hon. Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He graduated from Columbia College in 1993 and Columbia Law School in 1996.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election, and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including the AEI book on tax reform, Toward Fundamental Tax Reform. He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. His popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

David Weisbach is Walter J. Blum professor of law and director of the law and ecnomics program at the University of Chicago. Mr. Weisbach clerked for Judge Joel M. Flaum of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and worked as an associate in the law firm of Miller & Chevalier. In 1992, Mr. Weisbach joined the Department of Treasury where he worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of the Tax Legislative Counsel and, subsequently, as associate tax legislative counsel. In 1996, Mr. Weisbach was appointed associate professor of law at Georgetown Law Center and joined the Chicago faculty in 1998. Mr. Weisbach is primarily interested in issues relating to federal taxation.

Alan D. Viard is a resident scholar at AEI. Prior to joining AEI, he was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University. He has also worked for the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress. Viard has written on a wide variety of tax and budget issues.

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